


an Other

by inkbender



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Gen, Magic and Science, and crests are a curse, technically blood magic, technology versus crests, what if agartha won and seiros lost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-23 16:55:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21084689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkbender/pseuds/inkbender
Summary: Claude encounters a little ghost in the forest just outside his hometown and, unsure of what to do, takes her to Hilda's for tea and sweets.





	an Other

**Author's Note:**

> This story will eventually explore a world in which Agartha took over, championing an age of technology and science over magic and crests. Yet magic isn't so easily erased... but for now, this story begins with a child's first encounter with an Other.

They should’ve set up boundaries to their sudden game of hide-and-go-seek tag, Claude thinks. Something like _ within town limits. _ Definitely along the lines of _ don’t go into the forest. _Most children visiting town generally stay within a few blocks of their parents anyways, why would the crazy kid covered in tribal markings be any different?

Though he doesn’t know how he could’ve told her so in the first place. S’not like she speaks a word of Agarthian to begin with.

Ah well. Evening is here, bringing with it a pretty bone-chilling fog from the ocean that’s sure to drive even the most wild child towards the light and warmth of the port city. It’s the perfect creepy kind of mist too, the kind that fuzzes out most of your sight but not all of it, just enough to give you fleeting glimpses of what could be scary things or totally regular things but you’ll never know and so your imagination runs with that, goes crazy, creates all sorts of ghosts and creepie-crawlies and stuff. 

If only Ashe had come along in this wild goose chase. Maybe brought a lantern too--not to light the way, but for Claude to shine under his chin for that creepy lighting effect. This is the perfect setting for the best of ghost stories. He has a really good one up his sleeve too. Even made Hilda cry. Holst had smacked him upside the head for that. 

Wait--there. Something very un-foresty moved. He stumbles through the brambles, not really bothering to be sneaky anymore. “The game’s over, okay?” he calls. “You need to go back to the inn.”

Claude stills. The forest is quiet around him. He wishes Ashe was by his side if only to be scared instead. Bravado’s easier to fake if somebody’s around to believe in it. 

There--a bit of white amongst the dark wood ahead. Maybe. The evening haze washes all color from the world, replaces it with shades of grayscale, but he could’ve sworn he’d heard the rustle of leaves as well. He pushes forward with renewed determination. “Hey! Come back! Let’s go home!” 

Maybe the foreign girl wore a white shirt? He can’t remember. She had dark sun-kissed skin, almost as dark as his, and she hadn’t been wearing a lot so the markings on her arms and thighs were visible. She definitely must be cold. Why then would she be running deeper into the woods? This almost stops him up short--realizing that the movement he’s chasing is leading him away from the town, away from his friends and the warmth and brightness of civilization. But even his quick pause almost causes him to lose sight of the ghost. It must be a ghost he’s chasing, seeing as he never gets any closer no matter how noisily he stomps through the forest.

“Hey--”

“Quiet.”

_ “Shi--!” _Claude almost screams, cuts himself off at the last second. Screaming at a pitch likely to rival Hilda’s is perfectly alright if it’s justified. A bodiless voice in a haunted forest totally counts. 

“Silence!” hisses the voice again. A girl’s. She appears before him, almost as if from thin air, with glowing pink eyes and hair so wispy and white that he’s half-convinced she’s truly a ghost before she grabs his elbow. “They’ll hear.”

“What,” he wheezes. The girl has to reach up to hold his elbow. She steers him just fine despite her way smaller size. “What. Who.”

“Nobody,” she says. “Go away.”

Claude angles his head back as she pushes him onward. Even upside down, he can’t deny it: the girl is tiny, smaller than Ashe, can’t be more than ten years of age. She looks like she could so easily dissolve into the twilight haze. He grabs her wrist and flips about to face her and stops their forward progress in one go. “Away? You know we’re probably headed in the same direction, right? I think it’s almost your bedtime.”

“It’s not too late.” She doesn’t stop pushing him along, throwing her weight against his side until he takes a few steps. At least it’s towards the village. “Keep walking and nobody has to sleep.”

“Except for babies like you,” he teases, not sure if she caught his jab the first time. Though she doesn’t rise to his bait this time either. Huh. “Okay, okay, I’m going. Com’on.”

He tightens his grip on her wrist, even when she stalls and tries to pull away. 

“What are you doing?” the girl hisses.

“Bringing you back to your parents?” He meets her eyes, then raises their joined hands into her line of sight. Her eyes focus on their point of contact for a second before darting over to the snug metal band on his wrist. Huh, almost forgot it was there. “I’m not going to lose sight of you the moment I let go, am I?”

He’s expecting anger or indignation or frustration on her baby face--not fear. Just a flash before she schools it underneath a mostly blanked-out expression. But now that he’s seen it, he can’t help but spot traces of it everywhere else--the slight tremble of her arm, the shakiness in her voice, how her sentences are broken in sharp, short little bursts of emotion. Probably ran away from home or something. Expecting to be hit or otherwise punished when she returns. 

“Hey, hey there,” he says. He crouches by her side--not that he’s much taller than she is, but the first thing he learned in the art of bending the truth was that the smaller you are, the more people tend to trust you. “I’ll go home with you, alright? I can stick around, y’know, to play and we can totally pretend I didn’t catch you all the way out here so your parents don’t get mad and stuff. Or, or--even better--we can go to my friend’s house, the big fancy one in the middle of town, and call your parents from there. They can’t get mad if you were playing with the mayor's daughter and her friends all day.”

She’s shaking her head until he says _ friends. _In the dying light of the sun, half-obscured by mist, he barely catches the flicker of emotion in her wide eyes. It’s something, coupled with the abrupt pause in wordless protest, and he pushes onward. 

“Yeah! We’ll all be your friends for the day. Ashe is about your age and his parents own the inn your parents are staying at, so he can vouch for you. Leonie’s here for the week, she’s from the next village over, she’s here a lot because she helps her family sell grains and stuff to the merchants’ market. We left Hilda behind because she doesn’t like playing outside so much, not that we were going to be gone for very long, but that girl with the markings, she’s really fast, like really, really fast, and really hard to catch. But Hilda is really nice. She lives in a separate part of town than the rest of us, but she’ll always let us in and she has tea with lots of sugar. Sweets too.”

The girl doesn’t resist when he pulls her along this time. In almost no time at all, they’re at the edge of the woods within the lights of the town. He blinks; he could have sworn he’d been stomping through bramble looking for the foreign girl for at least ten minutes. But just twenty feet away is a dark silhouette at the top of the wall, fingers in her mouth, broadcasting a shrill whistle that has the foreign girl behind her cringing in response. 

“Idiot!” Yup, definitely Leonie. “Why didn’t you whistle back?”

_ I was so deep in the forest I couldn’t hear _will probably earn him a slap (nah, this is Leonie, he can expect a solid punch), so instead he lifts the girl’s hand. “Look at who I found!”

Leonie scales down the wall, the foreign girl close at her heels. “Who’s she? I thought the Kirstens were the last arrivals of the day.”

“Raphael is here?” Claude’s week just got better. “That’s great! I gotta go say hi later. For now, we have to go to Hilda’s.”

Leonie’s nose scrunches up in distaste. “Why?”

“Oh yeah, you’re coming too. We have to spend at least _ some _time at Hilda’s if the lie is going to be at all convincing.” He winks at the foreign girl. “Plus I don’t know if you’ve been to Agartha before, but teatime is definitely a thing you don’t want to miss.”

“Except it’s not even remotely close to teatime. Dinner’s in an hour.” 

Claude grins. “I’m sure we can manage to finish before then.” 

Leonie looks pointedly at Claude’s tiny charge, then at the fifteen-foot stone barrier behind them. “Not if we have to go around the long way.”

“You’re right; we’ll definitely have to go over that wall.” He picks at the metal band on his left wrist absentmindedly. “Yeah, I got this…”

“Don’t,” Leonie says. She grabs his hand as if she can physically stop him. “It’s not worth it.”

The foreign girl speaks a string of sing-songy syllables. Claude hasn’t a clue what she said, but his little ghost crawls onto her back immediately, no questions asked. The foreign girl promptly hops onto the wall and, hugging the rocky surface as tightly as a squirrel, scampers vertically upward with as little jostling of her passenger as possible, until she breaches the lip.

Claude’s jaw drops another inch when Leonie imitates her right away. Her journey isn’t as smooth or fast, but she follows the same path and, once she reaches the top, she flips around, takes a seat, and dangles her legs in a carefree manner as if what she’d just done wasn’t impossible. 

Which. Whatever. It wasn’t, seeing as two girls had just done it. But two can play that game. Just gotta… somewhere inside of him… _ there-- _

A roaring blast of wind deposits him just short of the top of the wall. He slams rather gracefully into the stone a foot away from Leonie’s left leg, almost pulls her off the wall in his frantic attempts to stay on top; both are saved by the foreign girl hauling them both back. 

At least the foreign girl gets a good laugh out of it. 

Leonie looks really scared until he shows her his wrist. 

“Not this time,” he says.

The foreign girl peppers him with questions all the way to Hilda’s. Though he can’t really understand her, he kind of gets the gist of what she’s trying to say. Crests, elemental powers, blah. But he’s not really feeling like demonstrating in the city, not when so many others are watching, so he just stares blankly at her while secretly laughing at her increasingly crazy gestures until Leonie punches him for no good reason.

His little ghost is a little wide-eyed, he notices, craning her head upward the further they travel into the town. Not all street lights have been lit as of yet; it’s still possible to glimpse the faint outlines of all manners of docked airships in the sky. Claude’s content to let her walk into a lamppost. Leonie glares at him as she tugs the girl aside.

“Goodness, Claude,” says Hilda at the back entrance to her house. “So many girls! For me? I’m so touched!”

“Is Ashe still here?” He peeks over her shoulder.

“Nah, he had to help his parents fetch stuff for dinner.”

Leonie looks like she’d rather help Ashe with shopping but follows along when Claude motions her inside. 

“Speaking of dinner, d’you still have leftover cake?”

Hilda rolls her eyes. “If I did, Claude, then I suppose you’d be helping yourself to the rest?”

“Excuse me?” He places a hand on the shoulders of the two new girls. “Nah, _ they _get the honors. I’m just here to watch the awestruck expressions on their faces.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” she snarks, “but sure. I’m Hilda Goneril, by the way. And you are?”

The foreign girl clasps her hands together and bows. “Petra.”

Leonie’s watching him closely. He takes in this information without reaction, but Leonie smiles anyways. “You didn’t knooow,” she sings.

“What? Of course I did.”

“No you didn’t.”

“I did!”

“Then why’d you never call her by her name?”

“Why didn’t _ you?” _

“Because then you would’ve known what it was, dummy.”

Hilda leans toward his little ghost. “And what’s your name, sweetie?”

The girl stares at her impassively. 

Leonie and Hilda turn their gazes to Claude. 

He wilts.

Leonie punches him--harder, and in the same spot too. 

“Holy shit, Leonie!”

Hilda slaps him upside the head. “Language!”

“You don’t know her name either?” Leonie yelps. 

He gives his little ghost his best _ look at what they’re doing to me, please help _expression. 

She stares at him impassively. 

“So she doesn’t want us to know who she is or where she came from,” he says. Totally unaffected by her utter lack of support. “The thing is, I found her lost in the woods and kind of promised her that we’d lie to her parents so they won’t get angry at her for getting lost in the woods. She’s been eating cake with us all day, right?”

He blocks Leonie’s punch because his bruise doesn’t need another bruise. He slaps away the next one too, then dodges behind Hilda altogether when the foreign girl, Petra, attempts an assist. 

Leonie throws up her hands. “I suppose you expected me to do the actual lying, huh? Since I’m the one walking with her back to the inn.”

“Wellll, if you need help--”

Hilda herds them all into the kitchen. “Tea first! And just one slice of cake. Nuh uh uh!” She pushes Claude away from the pantry. “I’ll dole out the cake. Wouldn’t want Ashe’s mom blaming me for spoiling your dinner appetites.”

“You just want more cake to yourself.”

“Yes, yes,” Hilda says, pulling a paper-wrapped tray from the bread box. “Oof, this is heavy. I can’t believe you’re making me work--to serve you, on top of all that.”

“I’d be happy to serve food, madam.” 

“Yeah, I don’t trust you, Claude dearest. Can you steep the tea? The rose petal, please.”

Leonie wrinkles her nose. Claude sticks out his tongue, tilting his face so Hilda can’t see. 

“Oh!”

Claude’s head snaps in the direction of the little happy sound that just came from his little ghost, seated atop a bar stool with a completely blissed-out expression on her little face. 

“Oh!” she says again, chewing slowly. “This… This is cake?”

Hilda beams. “I made it!”

“You mean _ Holst _made it and you licked the batter off the spoon.”

“I helped him clean,” she corrects primly. “I also grabbed stuff for him. And kissed him on the cheek and sang _ I love you _at least twenty times. Sooo much work. Totally worth it.” 

“It is very sweet. Quite lovely indeed,” says the little ghost. Her plate is already almost empty. 

Claude pours a few cups of tea and passes them out. He takes a wild guess and dumps two generous teaspoonfuls of sugar along with an ice cube into the teacup before the little ghost. Leonie picks up the steel creamer in the same moment Petra sniffs her teacup curiously, obviously intrigued by its intense fragrance--before pouring the entire cup, all boiling water and stray tea leaves without milk or sugar, down her throat in one big gulp. 

Petra replaces her cup neatly on its plate before balking at the ensuing silence. Leonie places the creamer back on the counter.

“Holy shit.” Hilda pours her another cup. “Do that again!”

Leonie touches the column of Petra’s throat gingerly. “That doesn’t hurt?”

Petra tilts her head sideways like a confused puppy and fires off another string of excited words. The next few minutes are consumed by the foreign girl demonstrating all aspects of her complete immunity to boiling water, followed by her astonished laughs as Hilda, Leonie, and Claude demonstrate their pathetic needs to supplement tea with ice and sugar and such. 

Claude snaps to attention when the white-haired girl climbs down from her seat. “Going somewhere, little ghost?” 

Leonie snorts. _ “That’s _the nickname you came up with?”

“She--the way she appeared--her hair color--never mind,” Claude groans. “Yeah, that’s what I called her in my head. You got anything better?”

“The adorable one?” Hilda gushes. “Look at her eyes! I didn’t think it was possible, but they’re more pink than mine.”

Leonie glances at the clock, promptly everybody to follow. “We all should probably get going though,” she says ruefully. “It’s almost dinnertime.”

“It is probably for the best that you remember me that way,” says his little ghost. “Still… I am grateful.”

“What do you have to be grat--” Claude’s gaze drop from the clock. He freezes. Her little voice is still ringing in his ears but--

In the space of a blink, she’s disappeared. 

Petra jumps, drops a single, sharp syllable Claude has no doubt is a curse word in her language. 

“What the--” Leonie startles off her barstool completely. “What the heck? Where’d she go?”

Hilda stares at the empty spot the little ghost had previously occupied. “Was that--Did she have a crest? She didn't have a bracelet. Can people with tainted blood do that? Uh, sorry, Claude.”

"No offense..." He scratches his head. “You mean, like, teleport? Change space-time? Uh, um… I think… the Fell Dragon--”

“Uh, no, let’s not talk about that,” snaps Leonie. She rushes down the hall, back door banging open as she checks outside. Petra moves to follow her, only for Leonie to return just as quickly. “Let’s also not go on a wild goose chase,” she says. “It’s dinnertime, we can’t disappear when our parents--” She runs her hands through her cropped hair. “Holy shit. What just happened?”

“I didn’t imagine her, did I?” Claude says. There’s still an empty fifth plate on the kitchen counter, still littered with crumbs. “The little ghost girl. She was real, wasn’t she?”

Petra claps her hands together, drawing their attention. She draws her hands apart and stares hard at the space in between as if willing something to happen. 

After a few seconds, Hilda speaks up. “Let’s go to the inn. You too, Claude. I’ll come as well. We’ll keep an eye out for adults with white hair, and if we see them, we’ll tell them what happened.”

“That, what?” says Leonie. “We found their daughter in the forest, invited her in for tea half an hour before dinner, and then she just vanished? Like that?”

Claude tips up the small, empty teacup. There’s still a few drops of undissolved sugar sludge at the bottom. Rose-flavored syrup, and she’d downed it within a few minutes. So much sugar for such a quiet little ghost. 

“We’ll come up with an excuse when we get there,” Hilda says. “Com’on, we’re going to be late.”

* * *

Nobody’s ever seen the little white-haired ghost. 

* * *

As the years pass, it’s easier to pretend they never saw her either. It’s easier to explain. Easier for the mind to accept. 

* * *

It’s a quiet little town. So small. So lax with their law enforcement: the boy’s wrist monitor hadn’t so much as beeped at his violation. 

The city would be so easy to wipe off the map. 

Much harder to cover up though. It’s a border port, a miniature commercial hub sandwiched between two countries, a stopover for many airship trading routes. Too many people from too many different places. Too many ways for information to spread.

And… the cake was nice. So was the tea. And the children… _ friends… _strong, loud, happy. Untouched. 

“Don’t touch them,” she says.

“They know nothing,” she says. 

“I’ll go back with you,” the little ghost says, “if you leave him and his blood alone.”


End file.
